For Want of a Red-Haired Woman
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: LVMW. Voldemort has been going fruitlessly back in time for several cycles to try and prevent Harry Potter from winning the war, but nothing works. At last he decides that, since Harry only really won because of his friendships with Ron and Hermione, he will seduce Molly Prewett and ensure that she doesn't give birth to Ron Weasley. Genius! COMPLETE.


**Title: **For Want of a Red-Haired Woman  
**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.  
**Pairings: **Voldemort/Molly Weasley  
**Content Notes: **Crack, time travel, AU  
**Rating: **PG-13  
**Wordcount**: 3700  
**Summary: **Voldemort has been going fruitlessly back in time for several cycles to try and prevent Harry Potter from winning the war, but nothing works. At last he decides that, since Harry only really won because of his friendships with Ron and Hermione, he will seduce Molly Prewett and ensure that she doesn't give birth to Ron Weasley. Genius!  
**Author's Notes: **This is one of my "From Samhain to the Solstice" fics for this year and is not meant to be serious at all. The title is a play on the "For Want of a Nail" phrase.

**For Want of a Red-Haired Woman**

Voldemort snarled as he watched yet another future where he could have won dissolve like sand through an hourglass. His hand went to the Time-Turner around his neck and he brooded like the genius he was, watching as Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger threw their arms around Harry Potter's neck.

The next moment, Voldemort knew, Potter would turn and smile at the ginger-haired harpy he had married. It was sickening. But no attempts to get rid of her ever worked. She got rescued at the last moment when he tried to make her possession in Potter's second year stronger, she refused to pick up any other Horcrux even when exposed to them, and the broom accidents that should have killed her in a foolproof way just resulted in her doing some daredevil maneuver that the other Gryffindors whooped and cheered her for.

Red-haired _bitch. _Voldemort savored the sound of the word in his mind. He hated her. She was standing in the way of progress.

His gaze went back to the moment that would stay frozen until he spun the hourglass around his neck. Weasley and Granger grinned foolishly at each other from either side of Potter. Voldemort fumed. Arranging an accident for them after the war did nothing, and they escaped the Horcruxes and the cliff's edges and the "accidental" werewolves and the Acromantulas and the runaway Abraxans and the dragon he'd released at the Triwizard Tournament as if they had a charmed life.

Voldemort, of course, knew better. No one had a charmed life if he did not. He was simply fighting the resistance of time, which did not want to be changed, even by a genius.

He scowled at Weasley and Granger again. They would not die as adolescents or adults, and hurting them as children was impossible. Weasley had vigilant parents, and he had never managed to locate Granger in the Muggle world, which he barely wished to venture into anyway. It was no place for someone of his caliber.

How much easier his life would have been if they had never been born—

Voldemort froze, eyes wide. The image of the hugging and grinning brats in front of him hung in the dark.

Then his laughter joined it.

He _would _do it. It would be so easy. He would go and seduce Molly Prewett, as she had been before her marriage to Arthur Weasley. Trying to kill her was probably doomed to failure because of the resistance of history, but surely a _seduction _would be acceptable to those forces? Who a single woman married was of little consequence and would cause small ripples.

Small ripples to history, but everything to him.

He was still exulting when he spun the hourglass again—a weapon he had found when he was young, and which his native intelligence had urged him to keep in readiness—and disappeared.

* * *

Seducing Molly Prewett was a fool's game.

She was already mooning over Arthur Weasley when Voldemort saw her, and he had to disguise his inhuman face with illusions, and he had to soften his usual manner of speaking and act as though he was fascinated by her, and he contained his disgust at her simpering smile, and he nodded and drowsed through evenings of boredom while looking alert, but all of this was still easier than trying to destroy Harry Potter's friends or wife some other way.

As Molly sighed in his arms, Voldemort congratulated himself on how thoroughly he had made her fall in love with him.

When Molly walked right past Arthur Weasley on the path that led to Hogsmeade, never paying attention to him while she chatted gaily to Voldemort, Voldemort looked over his shoulder and stuck his tongue out.

(Such behavior was not fitting of the Dark Lord of all the World and Eternal Nemesis to Harry Potter, but no one knew him for that in this time).

Nothing of the fierce resistance he had come to expect from the forces of history surged up to oppose him when he persuaded Molly to put aside the contraceptive potions and the other barriers to conceiving his child that she had managed to dream up. Why stand in the way of dreams? And of course, if something happened and there was a child, Voldemort would make _sure _she was taken care of.

"Taken care of" could have many meanings, and the Gryffindor witch never thought of all of them. She sighed and moaned and swooned, and Voldemort only had to pause a few times to think of the future he would win by copulating with her. He supposed it was all academic in the end. He had never done this before.

He had ingested his own potions, though. He knew that he was fertile, that he would engender a child in her.

He was chuckling to himself as he rose from the vast, Transfigured bed in the Forbidden Forest where they had lain together and cast the spell that allowed him to fly without a broom. He would leave her, and she would be pregnant with his child and never marry Arthur Weasley!

Sometimes, Lord Voldemort regretted that he had intervened in the timeline. It meant that he had no one to share his absolute genius with.

* * *

A fortnight later, another manifestation of that genius made him rise from his bed in the renovated Riddle House with wide eyes.

Yes, it was true that Molly Prewett had not dated Arthur Weasley, had not married him, and was now pregnant with a child that carried no Weasley blood. But what would _keep _her from marrying the blood traitor in the future? There were men who could put aside another's child. Or exile it into the Muggle world.

Lord Voldemort might have prevented no more than the birth of Ron Weasley's oldest brother, not Ron Weasley himself.

Hastily, he dressed himself up in the illusion that he had used whenever he faced Molly—tall, dark-haired, pale, soulful, with an aristocratic nose—and Apparated to the cottage where he had left her. He _must _find her and take further steps to ensure that Ron Weasley would never be born and Harry Potter would never triumph.

But he was still a genius, in the end, since his mind had warned him in time.

* * *

"But you left me, Arctos. Why did you do that?"

Voldemort sighed to himself. He wished now that he had chosen a name that was more distinct from the name of Arcturus Black. At the time, it hadn't seemed important. He would only carry it long enough to make Molly Prewett carry a child. But now he would have to hear it for weeks, at least. Maybe months.

Years?

Voldemort shook his head and reached out to clasp Molly's hand. He had located her laboring in the Leaky Cauldron for Tom, a man whose name Voldemort hated, and had charmed her into coming upstairs with him. She had done it, but she watched him warily and cupped a hand before her belly as if she thought he would cut out the bastard.

Voldemort would not. That child was important to his future plans. He had to persuade Molly to listen only to him.

"I told you that I had lost my only love," he whispered. Molly nodded, her shadow swaying in the candlelight in this small room. It was the romantic story Voldemort had used to lure her into bed. Women loved a man they thought they could fix.

"But I realized that I have another one now," Voldemort said. He paused and fixed a gaze on Molly, who lifted a trembling hand to shield her mouth. But she said nothing and also kept that other hand cupped in such a way that said she clearly thought him a threat to her unborn brat, so Voldemort was forced to continue. "I could not deal with the realization. I left you to think. I always intended to come back, Molly, my dear. But it took longer to work through my guilt about my dead love than I thought."

"You _left_."

"I left, but I'm here now," Voldemort said, and kissed her hand, and wondered why in the world she was bothering to stare up at him with teary eyes. Was she blind? Would he have to worry about adjusting the eyes of his bastard offspring? "I want to marry you, my dear."

Between one breath and another, Molly transformed. She stared at him with half-blind (yes, it was a problem) worship in her eyes, and breathed, "You do?"

"Yes," said Voldemort, and it was most certainly true, not that Molly was a Legilimens who could detect lies. He wanted to keep an eye on her and make sure that she didn't marry someone else or raise his child from the womb to love Harry Potter.

When Molly gave him a misty smile and leaned against him, Voldemort was certain he had won. And he knew it when she gave him a small kiss.

In the end, he would win everything, because he was brilliant.

* * *

The wedding was larger than Voldemort had wanted, but not as large as Molly would have preferred, only containing dozens of her relatives instead of hundreds. Voldemort had accepted congratulations and suspicious glances from red-haired men until he began to wonder idly if the Prewett ancestors had worked spells to ensure the continuation of ginger hair in their family line.

Well, it did not matter. The color of his offspring's hair was not the important factor. The important thing was the fact that Molly was not yet visibly pregnant, and they could pass off the birth as an early one. And that she would never bear any child who would be friends with Harry Potter.

Voldemort brought Molly to Riddle Manor and watched with narrow eyes as she turned in a slow circle. He couldn't tell what she was thinking. But then she turned to him and nodded her chin firmly. "It will do."

Voldemort gave her the thin smile that was easier with the lips of his disguise. "I certainly hope so, my dear. I don't own any other house."

"After a thorough cleaning," Molly said, and then reached out and rolled up her sleeves and drew her wand. Voldemort blinked as dust began flying from every surface.

"Arctos Harold, join in," Molly added over her shoulder. It had amused Voldemort to say that his name was Arctos Harold Devereaux in this time, choosing Harold in mockery of Harry Potter and the French name in a nod to his true one.

But this statement did not amuse him. "I certainly will not join in something as simple-minded as housecleaning."

Molly paused, and turned her head. Her eyes were narrowed and there was a fire flickering in them that Voldemort had last seen in the eyes of the children she would have borne in another time. He stared at her, discomfited.

"If you want a comfortable bed, and a clean house, and no poison in your tea," Molly said sweetly, "then you'll join me."

Voldemort took up his wand, but more because it might make Molly reconsider things and go find Arthur Weasley if he didn't. All the time, he considered her out of the corner of his eye.

She would poison him? Perhaps he had underrated her, and she would have made a good consort in his true form.

* * *

Voldemort was there for the birth of the child. He noted with a slight sigh of disgust, as the baby slid free of the womb, that it did indeed have ginger hair. It seemed that he had been right about the Prewett ancestors and their preference for that color. Or perhaps he could not influence the child because his true form no longer had hair of any kind.

Molly cradled the boy close to her breast, her smile beatific. "William. William Harold Devereaux."

Voldemort started at the name. He had already known that the woman designed, in part, to name the brat after him, but he had not realized that the first name would be the same as that of the child she had borne in another time. He leaned over the boy and studied his face closely. Yes, he had blue eyes, and while they might not be the same shade of blue as those of the oldest son in that dead time, Voldemort could not be sure. He had never paid much attention to Bill Weasley.

"Perhaps a mouthful," Molly was musing, oblivious to the way he ignored her. "Best call him Bill, perhaps."

Voldemort cleared his throat ostentatiously. "I always hated being called Arty or Harry as a child," he observed. "I would not deprive our William of his full name."

"Really?" Molly smiled at him and reached out to squeeze his hand. "Well, that's nice to know, dear. I always called you Arctos in my mind, you know. Arty and Harry don't suit you at all."

Of course it did not. Harry Potter was an annoying brat who Voldemort would work against with all his might, while Arctos Harold Devereaux was a complex man who had seduced a woman who wanted children away from the man she was almost obsessively dating.

_I, _he thought, as he watched Molly move the brat into a position suitable for nursing, _am a triumph._

* * *

"What are you smiling about, Arctos?"

"Oh, nothing in particular, Molly dear," Voldemort said, while he sat down next to her and preened. It had taken him three years to make sure that he could separate Lily and James Potter and ensure that Harry Potter would never be born, while not traveling in time, since that would destroy the continuity where Molly was his wife and William his child. It was made more difficult by the fact that Lily Evans lived in the Muggle world and Voldemort had had no idea where.

But in the end, he had succeeded. He had recalled old memories of Snape's childhood, memories seen in his mind before the man had turned on him, and realized that it was likely Lily Evans would share the same town, if they had grown up together as children. So Voldemort had found Lily Evans and implanted a great desire to school in Ireland instead in her mind. That would remain even after she had spent a year at Hogwarts.

Of course, she was at the tiny wizarding school in Ireland now and Severus Snape and James Potter were both mourning her loss. Voldemort gloried in the acts of evil and destruction he had brought about. And he had discovered a way to make sure that Harry Potter would indeed never be born, along with his friends! He was the greatest of Dark wizards.

"Arctos."

Voldemort looked over—he had grown used to the name, although of course he would never feel the connection to it that he did to his own—and blinked when he saw the misty sheen in Molly's eyes. "What is it, dear?" he asked.

Molly smiled back at him. "I'm pregnant."

Well, he supposed it was an inevitable consequence of some sacrifices a man had to make.

* * *

Their second child, Charles Hades —Voldemort had felt he had to insist—came into the world in 1973, later, Voldemort was certain, than Charlie Weasley had been born. Molly had grown restless after the lad's birth, even though she also wanted to have more children, and had asked Voldemort what he planned to do for a career. Up until now, they had been living off his "inheritance" that Voldemort gloated over knowing was really loot.

Voldemort replied instantly. "I think I should prefer to stay home with the children, dear." There was no telling that one of them might not grow up and go off to Hogwarts and get Sorted into Gryffindor and emerge as a different sort of aid to Albus's plans, after all. Even though this time had no Voldemort, because he was right here (and was such a _genius_, it was unprecedented), Albus still had his fingers in many pies and the desire to control everything that no half-blood should feel.

"But we'll need something to support us when the inheritance runs out, Arctos."

Voldemort settled back and studied Molly. "I would not mind if you got a job, dear." It would keep her out of the house for part of the day, and leave him more able to strongly influence his sons towards the Dark.

Molly started a little, as if she had never considered that. "But what could I do? I don't have that many NEWTS from Hogwarts."

Voldemort smiled as he twisted the world further away from the terribly Light place it had wanted to go. "With your cooking skills? I am utterly certain you would run a _fantastic _restaurant."

* * *

The years went by pleasantly. Charles and William were intelligent boys who picked up the definitions of Dark Arts well and understood when Voldemort enjoined them to tell no one else. They knew that their mother, busy as she was with the rising success of her restaurant, Guinevere's Kitchen, in Diagon Alley, was too involved in making money for the family to understood all the theory as to why Dark Arts weren't that much more different than Light magic.

With the birth of Percival Lucifer and the twins Frederick Mammon and George Azazel, Voldemort had more children to contain—and more children to train and teach. He wondered idly, in spare moments, whether the Weasleys had been trying to create their own private army in the original timeline, one that would follow the dictates of Albus Dumbledore. Perhaps Albus had even encouraged them. Voldemort shook his head. He wouldn't put it past the man. Albus would do anything to rule the world.

Well, Voldemort fully intended to make sure that all his children, who besides William were dark-haired, thank you very much, had the truth too firmly implanted in their heads to fall victim to Dumbledore's indoctrination.

* * *

When Molly's sixth pregnancy came, the one that would have produced Ron Weasley in the original timeline, Voldemort was ready.

He had begun to weave stories long before of people who had abused him and broken his heart in the past, and all of them had Ronald as either a first or a middle name. He had to give Molly a distaste for it so that she would not even _think_ of choosing a name that she thought would cause him pain.

Molly smiled at him gently when Voldemort expressed fear about the possible names right before she went into labor. "You have nothing to worry about, Arctos," she said, walking about the room in the way that the traditionalist pure-blood midwife (Voldemort would have nothing else, and rejoiced at the thought of depriving a Mudblood of such a job) had recommended. "I promise that I would never name a child after a tormentor of yours." She paused, one hand low on her belly. "But I don't think we'll need to take the precaution, anyway."

Voldemort was dissatisfied, but the midwife came in then, took one look at Molly, and exiled him outside the room, so he did not get the chance to ask what she meant.

He knew it, of course (and he could have guessed it before, being as intelligent as he was) when he came back into the hospital ward and found Molly cradling infant twin girls, one in each arm.

"I thought," Molly said, with a long yawn, "that we could call the older one Victoria Merope. The middle name after your mother, of course. And this one is Guinevere Bathsheba, since I thought you might insist on that name."

Voldemort was so full of triumph that he didn't even mind that both the girls were red-haired, or that the midwife shooed him from the room before he got to test them for Dark Arts talent. _He had prevented Ron Weasley from being born!_

* * *

"I'm off, dear!" Molly called from the front door.

Voldemort called distractedly back to her, all his attention focused on Guinevere and Victoria, who were sitting in front of him. Despite the fact that she had a different name, the younger of his daughters looked remarkably like Ginny Weasley. Voldemort was determined that she would not grow up to marry Harry Potter (who, it seemed, had been born after all, Lily Evans somehow running into James Potter at the school in Ireland and being swept off her feet).

"Now," Voldemort said gravely to both of his daughters, "one thing you must understand is that Albus Dumbledore is—"

"_Evil_!" they shouted together.

Voldemort smiled. "Very good." He leaned back and looked proudly at his daughters, and then over at Frederick, George, and Percival, who were still a few years away from Hogwarts, playing the board game he had taught them that would help them plot world domination. William and Charles were at Hogwarts already, writing regular letters home where they reported on every movement from Dumbledore and his Light supporters. For some reason, they were both in Gryffindor, which had baffled Voldemort, but at least they were good spies.

He knew that he would get back to his war someday. But in a way, he had already won, by making sure that one of Harry Potter's best friends wasn't born and that Harry Potter would never marry Ginny Weasley, because she didn't exist.

He supposed he would have to spend many more years at home making sure that he wouldn't lose the war. There was always the chance that one of his children would befriend Harry Potter when his back was turned, otherwise.

But what were years, even years of peace, to a genius such as he? He could always begin where he had left it off. No one ever would have _suspected _this way of winning the war. They might look at him and think he was _domesticated._

Then again, Lord Voldemort had always known that the throne of supreme intellect was a lonely one.

**The End. **


End file.
